Just wanted to say thank you for writing this. Very cool take, that was so well written to get us on board for how and why “that old junk” has personality that is being lost.

Also

Damn.

Does route calculation happen on device or on Google servers? Is it cheaper for Google to not show alternate routes?

That movie couldve been so much more…

Some good ideas here. Probably go with a word limit in your last bullet instead of the 5 minutes

How’s that strategy working out for you? For us?

Unfortunately “don’t give them money” doesn’t work. Bc commerce is global due to internet. There will always be uninformed buyers in every product space. And always buyers who don’t care.

My solution, posts like this. We should be informing others of these practices and discussing ways to bypass, repair, or disable blocks and unintended behavior on the products and services we purchase.

About a month ago i asked gpt to draw ascii art of a butterfly. This was before the google poem story broke. The response was a simple

\o/
-|-
/ \

But i was imagining ascii art in glorious bbs days of the 90s. So, i asked it to draw a more complex butterfly.

The second attempt gpt drew the top half of a complex butterfly perfectly as i imagined. But as it was drawing the torso, it just kept drawing, and drawing. Like a minute straight it was drawing torso. The longest torso ever… with no end in sight.

I felt a little funny letting it go on like that, so i pressed the stop button as it seemed irresponsible to just let it keep going.

I wonder what information that butterfly might’ve ended on if i let it continue…